Bela Bartok

In 1909 at the age of 28, Bela Bartók married 16 years old Márta Ziegler. Their son, Béla III was born the next year. The couple divorced in June 1923.

In 1923, he married a 19 year old piano student, Ditta Pásztory. Their son, Péter was born in 1924.

Bela Bartók was brought up as a Roman Catholic and by his early adulthood he became an atheist. He later converted to the Unitarian faith in 1916.

Béla Bartók was born on 25 March 1881, in the small Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary. His father was the director of an agricultural school.

He had mixed ancestry; on his father’s side he belonged to a Hungarian lower noble family while on his mother’s side, he was of ethnic German lineage.

He exhibited remarkable musical talent from early childhood. By the age of four, he could play 40 different pieces on the piano and at five he began taking formal lessons in music.

He was also a frail and ailing child, often suffering from severe eczema. In 1888 at the tender age of seven, he lost his father. Soon after, his mother took him and his sister, Erzsébet to live in Nagyszőlős and later to Pozsony.

His first public performance was at the age of eleven in Nagyszőlős; his recital was well appreciated. He played several pieces including one of his own compositions, ‘The Course of the Danube’, written at the age of nine.

From 1899 to 1903, he trained at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, learning piano under the competent guidance of István Thomán and composition under János Koessler. At the Academy, he befriended Zoltán Kodály, who motivated him significantly and became his lifetime friend and co-worker.

In 1903, he composed his first major orchestral work, ‘Kossuth’, a symphonic poem which honoured Lajos Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.

He met Richard Strauss in 1902 at Budapest and his music strongly influenced Bartok’s early works. From 1907 onwards, he drew inspiration from the French composer Claude Debussy. Later, the works of the 19th century Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, and the modernists Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg also influenced him deeply.

In 1907, he became a piano professor at the Royal Academy. Some of his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, and Lili Kraus.

Alongside teaching, he continued composing music. Apart from major orchestral works inspired by Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, he also composed several small piano pieces which had influences of folk music. The first such example is the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor (1908).

Bela Bartók was deeply influenced by Debussy's music and this is clearly evident in the ‘Fourteen Bagatelles’ (1908). Till 1911, he composed various pieces that had elements of the romantic-style and folk melodies. He also composed his modernist opera ‘Bluebeard's Castle’ around this time.

He was also inspired by Klára Gombossy to compose the ‘Suite for piano opus 14’ (1916), and ‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ (1918). Meanwhile, he also completed ‘The Wooden Prince’ (1917).

Among his masterworks are the six String Quartets, the ‘Cantata Profana’, the ‘Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’, the ‘Concerto for Orchestra’, and the ‘Third Piano Concerto.’

To aid younger students and help his son Péter with his music lessons, he also wrote the book ‘Mikrokosmos’, a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces.